A speedrun through four things I've been meaning to write about
Renters have a right to know how much they're contributing to landlords' profit margins
In the last several weeks, there have been a number of stories popping up that I’ve wanted to write about, and each one keeps flying past me before I can write about the last one, so I thought I’d run through a few of them here.
Rather than let you guess what may be further down, here’s a little table of contents:
Renters’ bill of rights
Decampment? Cleanup?
The Office of the Auditor General’s report on safe supply and overdose prevention sites
The Yaletown OPS is set to close soon, with no indication of a replacement site
That first one was originally going to be a long-overdue review of two hearings around safe supply here — one from a federal committee interrogating a provider of safe supply and another in Federal Court reviewing Health Canada’s decision to reject the Drug User Liberation Front’s application to run a compassion club, but that section alone (still not completed) is almost as long as this entire post, so it’s going to be its own thing.
The renters’ bill of rights is, uh, something?
Note: I volunteer as an organizer with the New Westminster Tenants Union. I do not speak for the NWTU, but this experience does inform my perspective on tenants’ issues.
The federal government announced a few measures for renters this week, and it’s hard to understate how much they amount to.
The three measures include a $15-million legal aid fund for tenants fighting bad-faith evictions and unfair rent hikes. Speaking to Canadian Press, Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre legal advocate Rob Patterson lauded the legal aid funding, saying his organization, which would likely be a beneficiary of the funding, is “trying to drink the ocean with a spoon.”
But it’s hard to imagine this would be much more than an upgrade to a ladle.
It’s worth noting that this — the funding that would presumably benefit the organization he works for — was second on Patterson’s list of items he is interested in.
The first was the renters’ bill of rights.
And it’s the most eye-catching among the announcements. The bill of rights was largely undefined, as it would need to work with the provinces to establish a national set of standards in a sector that bleeds across jurisdictional boundaries.
The document would, the federal government announced, help “crack down on renovictions, create a nationwide standard lease agreement, and give renters more agency.” It would also require landlords to disclose historical rent pricing “so renters can bargain fairly.”
Who, it needs to be asked, is bargaining their rent in this economy?
Patterson, in the CP story, called it a positive step that could help facilitate vacancy control — that is, barring rent increases between tenancies — as more data would be available to enforce this.
But given federal and provincial governments’ history of leaving housing to the private sector, with much of the recent movement into public investment in housing still ultimately ending up as private sector housing, it’s hard to imagine they will actually take that step rather than shrugging and saying “I hope renters and landlords will work it out!”
Transparency is good, obviously, but it’s hard to see this actually having any effect in a rental market in which landlords have all of the bargaining power.
The last one is both the most insidious and the only one that will not only do little to help in the best case, but will actually likely cause harm in many cases: rent contributing to credit scores.
Prime minister Justin Trudeau characterized this as giving renters a leg up to borrowing money so they can get into homeownership, and it’s hard to believe anyone actually asked for this. The primary barriers aren’t credit scores — it’s being entirely unable to save money to buy in an unreachable retail market due to rents and other costs of living that are unaffordable.
But for many people, sky-high rents will mean being unable to make rent on time, meaning for many people renters will only experience worse credit histories as a result. If landlords can then look that credit history up, this makes them unlikely to rent to those tenants.
In the best case, some people will be able to get loans they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get, and maybe that will help, but it’s just as likely to put more people deeper into debt. In the worst case, it crystallizes cycles of poverty.
‘Cleanup’ vs ‘decampment’?
The City of Vancouver is insisting their “cleanup” in the CRAB Park Tent City is not a decampment, but if it isn’t, that would seem to be against the wishes of Park Board commissioners.
Emails obtained by Stop the Sweeps, which don’t seem to have gotten much, if any, traction in media, suggest ABC Parks Board commissioners committed to the Gastown Residents Association shortly after the 2022 election that they would clear the CRAB Park encampment.
In a Jan. 18 email, a member of the GRA emailed ABC commissioners Scott Jensen and Brennan Bastyovanszky — CCing ABC mayor Ken Sim, VPD chief Adam Palmer and deputy chief Howard Chow, and ABC councillor Peter Meiszner — about the attempted construction by Downtown Eastside advocates of tiny homes in the park.
Those efforts were blocked by park rangers, but the GRA email said the situation “is clearly escalating.”
“Your assurances to this group (Gastown Residents) seem to have completely disappeared. We were assured early in your tenure with the Parks Board that steps would be taken to clear this encampment and return the park to community use,” the email, which Stop the Sweeps posted to Twitter, reads.
“We were assured that the area covered by the fencing would be expanded to prevent the expansion of the camp, we were assured that additional trees/hedging would be added to the southern boundary to mitigate the community impact… NONE of this has happened.”
According to a press release by Stop the Sweeps, Jensen responded to say, “I like your suggestions,” and didn’t contradict the statement that residents were given those assurances.
When I asked the city last week for comment on those emails, they reiterated that it’s not a decampment but a cleanup and didn’t address the emails.
In the meantime, as residents of CRAB awaited their Monday deadline to move, park rangers were aggravating the situation, according to Stop the Sweeps. One tweet shows park rangers going into a shelter in one image and, in a video, seemingly damaging the shelter.
According to Stop the Sweeps, they were first told by park rangers that they had permission to do that, but the resident later returned and confirmed they didn’t give park rangers permission.
Whether it’s a cleanup or decampment is an important distinction. One important one, I’ll note, is that if residents are able to move back into the same space, they retain a certain community they’ve had — some for years.
On Sunday, one day before the J.R. told me she’d lived there for two years and said she’s in the decampment “pretty much 24/7” and called the community in the CRAB decampment “like a big family.” J.R. said she believed the residents would be able to move back in, but others are more skeptical of potential loopholes.
The CRAB Park “clean-up and compliance plan” published by the city cites an excerpt of the bylaw allowing temporary shelters, and highlights a subsection noting the shelters “must not hinder or interrupt the ability of staff or contractors to perform their work.” That leaves open concerns from camp advocates that any amount of resistance by residents could be used to bar individuals from returning to the new tent city.
But a city-run cleanup still has its problems. Residents of the tent city wanted to do a cleanup themselves, but the city declined, opting to do the cleanup themselves.
J.R. was most concerned at the moment about losing a lot of her things. She said she was prioritizing valuables and things with sentimental value, but noted she wasn’t sure how she could fit two tents worth of belongings into the small, single tents provided by the city.
Tent city residents said they had organized to clean up the space, but were told the city-run cleanup would happen anyway. J.R. said she would have preferred to have a community-run cleanup instead.
Working as a community to clean up the space, rather than the city taking over, would mean they could do it in a way that’s respectful to themselves and their privacy, and would allow them to keep their belongings and not have to go out and replace them.
I’ll have a fair bit more to write about this hopefully in the next week, but I’ll leave it, for now, on a letter signed by over 200 community members calling for the action to be halted.
Apparently the BC government has been sitting on diversion data
The BC government has apparently been tracking diversion of safe supply through a monitoring system but never told anyone.
The program was effectively announced in a report by the Office of the Auditor General looking into two harm reduction programs — prescribed safer supply and overdose prevention/safe consumption sites (OPS/SCS) — but little information was provided in that report.
The OAG noted in its report that its audit of safe supply originally included a section exploring “potential unintended consequences,” including diversion. But the report notes the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, after public concern about the program grew, “has developed an enhanced plan to further monitor the impact of prescribed safer supply diversion, as part of the broader evaluation and monitoring framework.”
The report notes the importance of collecting this data amid a climate of “clinician concerns about a lack of evidence for prescribed safer supply, and the politicization of the program.”
It adds that some health authorities “believe that communication by the ministries about prescribed safer supply, specifically about diversion, has been weak.”
This appears to be a broader issue with safe supply in a province that’s supposedly “as transparent as any jurisdiction in North America,” as the report notes a number of areas in which the ministries haven't been transparent about safe supply. That includes factsheets detailing how many people are on safe supply being updated monthly but not archived, leaving little trace of trends over time, and what information is available doesn’t show if or how the program is meeting its objectives.
The province has an “internal prescribed safer supply dashboard” that government staff can access, including breaking down safe supply prescriptions per month, broken down by health authority, drug class prescribed, sex, and age group. That dashboard was supposed to be public in September 2022, but here in March 2024, that dashboard still isn’t available to the public.
In other words, as debate rages over fear-mongering about safe supply, the government is just sitting on information that, if made public, could actually inform the public discourse in a productive way.
Other findings from the report include identifying five particular barriers to accessing safe supply:
Drugs often aren’t smokeable (more than two-thirds of unregulated drug deaths involve smoking) and hydromorphone isn’t potent enough for people who use fentanyl.
Prescribers are hesitant to prescribe safe supply due to stigma, perceived risk of diversion, and the fact that population-level evidence is still “new and evolving.”
Having to go to the pharmacy every day and other strict dispensation rules.
A lack of access in rural areas.
Stigma against drug users in the healthcare system and people feeling unsafe navigating the healthcare system due to racism, especially anti-Indigenous racism.
None of these barriers are new information, but having another report pointing to these issues is beneficial for pressuring the province to actually do something about improving access to safe supply.
On OPS/SCS, findings include:
Operational guidance was “out of step” with changes to the drug supply; it wasn’t always relevant to rural contexts; and it lacked standards around availability, accessibility and quality of care
A lack of performance targets and no evaluation of their effectiveness since 2021
Barriers to access, including infrastructure issues, local government resistance, a lack of services, and hiring and retention issues. The province was aware of these barriers but hasn’t developed strategies to address them
Speaking of OPS availability
The Thomus Donaghy OPS in Yaletown is set to close at the end of this month, and Vancouver Coastal Health won’t say if a replacement site has been found yet, according to Glacier Media.
This is in a context in which there already isn’t enough OPS capacity downtown, and particularly outside the Downtown Eastside, despite Yaletown seeing some of the highest rates of deaths from the toxic drug supply in the Lower Mainland.
It’s also worth noting that calls for needle cleanup to the city plummeted after this site opened.